(some vulgar slang, but (I think) tolerable by kids and the sexually modest)
Today’s (4/24) morning name, the final line of a quatrain I learned as boy lore about 1950:
How’s your ma and how’s your pa
And how’s your sister Sue?
And while we’re on the subject,
How’s your old wazoo?
(#1) The family-wazoo rhyme; I didn’t know the quantity adverbial up the wazoo at the time, so I mistakenly took wazoo to be a variant of street slang dick / cock ‘penis’
That is, I took #1 (with How’s your old wazoo?, literally ‘how’s your ass?’, figuratively conveying ‘how are you?’) to be similar in import to:
How’s your ma and how’s your pa
And how’s your brother Rick / Rock?
And while we’re on the subject,
How’s your big ol’ dick / cock?
(#2) The family-dick rhyme, with metonymy — the penis standing in for the whole man
The family-wazoo rhyme. This has pronominal your wazoo ‘your ass’ (plus the affectionate modifier old), with the wazoo variant of what Beavers & Koontz-Garboden 2006 refer to as pronominal ass, so merely conveying ‘you’ — that is, the final line conveys ‘how are you?’.
The reference:
John Beavers & Andrew Koontz-Garboden, A universal pronoun in English? Linguistic Inquiry 37.3.503-13 (2006)
about possessive pronoun + ass used as a pronominal (in black street vernacular, especially): e.g. their asses sure know how to fuckin’ jam ‘they sure know how to jam’.
About wazoo ‘buttocks. ass, anus’ earlier on this blog:
— in my 8/28/15 posting “Robots up the wazoo”, about wazoo ‘buttocks, anus’ (not an idiom in the strict sense, because it has no parts, but idiomatic in a loose sense, because it’s collocationally restricted) and about an idiom, the quantity adverbial up the wazoo ‘in / to a great extent’ (We’ve got Halloween candy up the wazoo)
— in my 9/29/20 posting “wazoo” (as a morning name) — with improved OED coverage; 1st cite for wazoo from 1961, for up/out the wazoo in 1981
1961 seems a bit late; I might have misremembered learning the family-wazoo rhyme at summer boys’ camp in 1950, but it was a great favorite of my Princeton roommate Frank Carr from at least 1959, and it was clearly old stuff for him. Plus, I have a clear memory of being astonished that for him (and, apparently, everybody else around me then), the wazoo in the rhyme meant ‘ass’, not ‘dick’.
But, yes, memory is a fragile thing.
The Firesign Theatre connection. In various social-media postings, the family-wazoo rhyme is attributed to the Firesign Theatre, a surreal comedy troupe (on radio and also in live performance). The rhyme definitely did occur in their performances, but clearly as one of their many quotations from pop-cultural sources, not as original material.
It’s in their second recording, How Can You Be in Two Places at Once When You’re Not Anywhere at All, originally released in July 1969 — in material beginning “I can tell by the pie on your tie”, with the final line, but without the family buildup:
I can tell by the pie on your tie
you’re an American, well so am I!
Hi bub, How are ya? How do ya’ do?
And while we’re on the subject
… And while we’re on the subject
… (And while we’re on the subject)
How’s your old wazoo?!
The routine then shifts gears completely:
I was born an American
I was raised an American
And I’ll die an American
In America, with Armenians.This land is made of mountains
This land is made of mud
This land has lots of everything
For me and Elmer Fudd
This land has lots of trousers
This land has lots of mausers
And pussycats to eat them
When the sun goes down
[and on and on, wandering from one image to another, ending with the count-out march:]
You ain’t got no friends on the left
You’re right!
You ain’t got no friends on the right
You’re left!
Hound dog – one two
Poontang – tree frog
Hound dog – poontang – coontown
I’s white!
Hound dog – poontang – coontown
Hound dog – poontang – coontown
Definitely a long strange trip. But entirely missing sister Sue. Surely a development from, not the original of, the family-wazoo rhyme.
April 24, 2026 at 2:08 pm |
How is your old wazoo,
is it red, is it white, is it blue?
Sung to the opening theme of Beethoven’s Archduke Trio –
Does anybody besides me remember this?
April 24, 2026 at 2:28 pm |
New to me. Do you have a link to a performance?
April 24, 2026 at 2:29 pm |
No – I think I learned it in college back in the 1950s.
April 24, 2026 at 2:36 pm |
Well, that was a long time ago…